ABSTRACT
The visual appearance and affect of fabric-formed concrete is strikingly different from that of conventional concrete architecture. Its “organic”, “biological”, or “sensual” nature contrasts sharply with the “hard” machine aesthetic of industrial modernism. To have access to a new formal language for architecture is not insignificant. In this case we are invited to think differently not only about form, but about how we build and what difference that might make. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the form-language of machine modernism can be (instrumentally) traced to the uniform-section sticks and sheets of industrialized building culture, founded in the co-evolved methods of traditional drawing and structural calculation, and the actions of the single-axis mill. The machine paradigm is surely one of the most profound products of the modern world, and the extraordinary changes this brought to previous, and archaic, agrarianbased cultures and economies cannot be overstated. The story of how a machine-like language of architecture displaced earlier biological/vegetal forms surely mirrors more profound changes in culture and imagination, as well as our relationship to nature in general. The agrarian basis of pre-industrial architectures can be seen in nearly every archaic architectural language of form. Consider the fleshy curves and vegetal and animal adornments of ancient Greek and Roman architecture, or the succulent stone leafs of ancient Egyptian capitals, or the endless variations of carved foliage from lotus to acanthus, or combinations of animal and human bodies, adorning facades and entablatures of classical architectures throughout the world; or more abstractly, the organicism of Gothic architecture with its bundled column stalks and the “flowering” of its ribbed vaults. All are products of agrarian cultures. While one can point to examples of non-machine, “organic” 20th-century modernisms, overall, the image and power of the machine has been triumphant. It is interesting that at this particular historical moment, when architectural design production has become fully digitalized, and when multi-axis robotic manufacturing technologies are making their entrance into industrialized construction economies, such a machine-saturated practice would be exploring ways of constructing curved, non-uniform-section forms and structures. It seems that a project of shaking off the geometric shackles imposed by “Industrialization 1.0” is well under way. Also interesting is the fact that this is happening at a time when ecology and “sustainability” hold a new and increasingly urgent place in our considerations and actions. It seems as if a desire
for “biomimetic” architecture is arising simultaneously from ecological concerns (or nostalgia?) and from digital design/production culture. The rediscovery of flexible formworks (see Chapter 2) arrives in this milieu. It is remarkable, from a sculptural point of view, that the energies at play in a flexible mould can be “read” so precisely in the final form. High levels of stress are cast as an energized field of tensed impressions. Areas of low stress appear almost palpably relaxed (Figure 1.7). One does not need formal structural knowledge to feel the differences in the energy created and held by a flexible mould. This knowledge seems innate to our own bodily existence and our own struggles with gravity – we know these forms and forces in our bodies, in our skin, in our clothing, and in the skins of other living things, both animal and vegetable. The degree to which these energies can be felt and innately understood from their final solidified forms is uncanny. It seems we know them intrinsically. This energy, once solidified, holds and conveys a tacit understanding between ourselves and force-in-matter, establishing an empathy with the world as we find it. These understandings are not so much represented by the final (cast) shapes, as embodied in them as a kind of “fact”, in the root meaning of that word: “a thing done”. Where form appears and solidifies of its own volition, so to speak, it has an aspect, and an affect, more akin to that given by nature than by the artifices of architecture. A casting from a flexible mould is almost like a physical form of “automatic writing” – it is made by us, but seems to come not from us. In this sense, the products of fabricformed concrete are outside of “design”. One cannot say if these shapes are “old” or “new”, “human” or “natural”. They simply are, in much the same way as tree bark is (which is to say, as tree bark happens). In this sense there is no style (as in fashion) in these architectural forms. They cannot be tied to any historical period – not even the present. They are new and immediate, yet they are as old as weaving, as old as skin. In this sense there is a strange time in these forms – both perpetually immediate time (like a photograph’s “stoppage” of a single instant) and extraordinarily archaic time (as if it has always been this way). What we see is clearly a result as much as it is an object. The verblike nature of these action-forms gives them a kind of held motion in the held-time of their becoming. It is this, perhaps, that also lends a narrative aspect to these energized, or vitalized, forms – they are quite literally the end of an action story: something happened and it ended exactly like this. This narrative aspect is both explicit (as “read” in the forms) and latent – that is to say, this new language is waiting to be used in an architectural ensemble that can speak of time and occurrence as much as it does of function or spatial composition. When forms of structural resistance are given, for example in a funicular compression vault made from a hanging fabric sheet, the action of the structure’s becoming (i.e. the resistance inside the fabric of the hanging mould) is perpetually replayed in its inversion as a compression structure (see Chapter 3). In this case, the forces in the concrete are not merely sculptural allusions
to a remote held-time or state, they are the actual shape of the concrete’s resistance to its own self-weight. All this is a direct result of flexibility – the ability to yield spatially to an imposed force – and the resistance generated by flexible materials through their deflection (think of how the increasing resistance of a stretched spring perfectly matches its increase in length). What the possibilities are for deploying such an energized “language” of verb-like, time-saturated forms in architecture is a very open question. Alongside this question is the parallel technical question of what new processes are called for once flexibility is allowed into the realm of construction and design. This chapter raises the first question, while this book as a whole attempts to answer the second. One intriguing aspect of fabric-formed concrete is the organic production of ornamental details. These are the self-forming bulges, tension arcs, wrinkles, pull-buckles – the stretch-marks, so to speak – that are offered up by the thin membrane of the mould. The same fabric formwork, held in a slightly different way, will produce slightly different formal or surface “events”. A builder’s decision about construction details directly determines the ornament-events to come, bringing the hand of the builder back into architecture in a surprising way. Just when the role of the builder’s hand in the language of architecture seemed completely erased, reduced to a pre-industrial historical relic, it makes a surprising reappearance precisely because of the flexibility (sensitivity) of the formwork material. Without struggle or nostalgia, an opening for the voice of the builder in architectural ornamentation and form returns. This is something that can be ignored, embraced, or suppressed, but the opportunity is quite real.
